Thursday, January 17, 2013

A bitterly contested wind farm proposed for Goodhue County got the go-ahead Wednesday to pursue a permit that would allow it to legally kill or injure eagles, in what could be the first case of federal authorities issuing a license to kill the protected national symbol.

The 48-turbine project would kill at most eight to 15 eagles a year, a number that would not harm the local population, federal officials said in a letter to state regulators.

The other day I took note of the fact that, as I have long predicted, the media is losing interest in climate change in large part because the climate campaign long ago became an unimaginative crashing bore. Moreover, as also long expected, we’re starting to see the “counter-intuitive” narrative start to appear—namely, that moderate warming might have net benefits. (Actually the IPCC reports have implied this all along, but the notorious Summary for Policy Makers, which is all most journalists and politicians ever bothered to read, always leaves this out or obscures it.)

The magnitude of the temperature drop in the stratosphere shown by the NOAA dataset might suggest that the changes have actually been driven from the ‘top down’ by the Sun rather than the ‘bottom up’ by the increase in CO2.